Floren Islands Coming Together

I spent a good bit of time on the weekend working through some various bugs, mainly with good success. Nothing major, just little bits here and there. I made some editor tweaks (adding a sort of colour picker that I can use to select terrain from the map directly to use) and annoyingly, some issue came up with the website here with a certificate becoming buggy.

The big news however, is that I've been spending a little time finally playing properly in the editor, crafting the world slowly. I'm getting the hang of things in the tools I've built, and I'm also working out my processes better, which is speeding things up nicely.

So here's a few nice images of West Floren Island coming to life in the day/night cycle and also the dark caves on the island. Luckily my party has been spending hard earned goblin loot on some torches which provide a good light source. I may or may not have also needed them for testing out some lighting functionality, but lets not let that spoil the narrative!

Quests feel.... completed?

It's been a few days of bug-and-not-quite-right whack-a-mole over the last few days with how things have worked. When I tweaked the conversation interface in the editor, it let me set up more complicated conversations. That in turn then let me set up a few test quests in a more complicated manner. Something that involves different sections, and different goals and the like. And overall it wasn't quite right in terms of how it was working. I've solved issues with picking up quests between logging off the game, and coming back in later, keeping track of requirements that have completely different things to do. Kill some specific amount of creatures, find and hand in a certain amount of items and the rest. Each of them holds a specific state of completion and it's been quite challenging to keep the server up to date with all those things as they happen and let you pick back up at the right place when you load the game back up again.

I've picked up a few new bugs along the way that haven't been fixed yet, but a lot of other things also works amazingly well. Quest items were dropping in the right loot at the right part of the quest when needed, then stopped again later. They're actually dropping a bit too often, so I've got some code in the loot tables to trawl through, but that's small fries I hope.

The plan is again, keep building out the world a bit more, using all the features as much as I can, and testing that functionality as I go, both in terms of pure function and in terms of does it look good enough for the app itself.

NPC Conversations gets the Editor Interface Glow-Up

I ended up continuing with the editor this afternoon after I wrapped up my Friday at work. Given that conversations and quests are intertwined, I thought I'd make it easier for myself and add in all the new fields into the conversations editor interface before I go building new quests and inject them into the conversations anyhow.

Long winded way of saying that the conversations editor now is rather shiny and fresh. There's a few visual things I'll add to make it even more intuitive, but the important stuff now works, so that everything that the app needs is a point and click interface to build in.

Quest building time tomorrow. Definitely. I mean, almost certainly. At the very least more than likely.

Editor Questing Revamp, and More Quests

As I started building a bit of a quest yesterday evening I started looking at all the things that I was amending in the database, to cater for new columns that I'd added and extra functionality that I was using in the app.... and of course, I side-quested myself into giving the editor a refresh in how the interface for quests looks and works. And most importantly, added all the new fields and some nice dropdowns etc.

So, perhaps today, I'll use all the new functionality nicely and neatly, create myself a quest that will let me check all the functionality I want to make sure works together in the app and cross my fingers for everything to work delightfully. At the same time, I think I'll go through the editor interface for NPC conversations and give it the same loving, as there's a bunch of new functionality there as well - which goes hand in hand with the questing work.

It's Friday, there's a whole weekend ahead of me. I'm feeling good!

Again, no screenshots here, there's nothing fancy or worthwhile  to show.

Not to Jinx it, but Quests...

Things went rather right this evening. I had a reasonably decent idea of what I wanted to write and how it was going to work. And... it did.

Quests that require you to gather a particular number of items will now nicely track those items if you open the quest, they have an NPC to hand them into, the right action button pops if if you've enough when you walk past - and the code nicely handles it when you hand them in. They can be any mix of stacked, single items across multiple characters even, and it only takes what's needed, so quests will have the capability to either require particular quest items - or normal items.

Anyhow, I'm rather feeling like the dog that caught the car again tonight, cause I sort of did all that (fixed a few bugs along the way as always) and tomorrow is a whole new day for something else again.

Actually, perhaps tomorrow is a good day to test a quest with multiple quest sections that mix up all these requirement types to make sure it really REALLY works, while it's all still fresh in my head. Yeah, I think that'll be the plan.

Quests, Quests, Quests!

This afternoon, like yesterday afternoon, I've been at quests, tweaking the behaviour as well as server updates. Basically, it's tedious as heck, but it's functionality that needs to be there, and I'm getting through it at a decent pace. I've tidied up the way that quests maintain events on the server, how they interact with themselves, and this evening I got the code working to correctly track and identify quests were you will need to kill a certain amount of something. Then of course I had a "Huh... well..." moment as I realized that nothing in my database would keep track of that particular aspect, so that also got fixed.

It seems to be working, and I've logged in a few times, killed one creature of a quest I am on and things seem to be updating nicely as they should.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping to either find something not quite right in tonight's work, or move on to quests that require a certain number of quest items to be collected in some manner - there's not going to be any need to store that on the server luckily, the items are already there, so it should just be a matter of counting items from inventories on the fly.

Questing and Conversational Weekend Work

I luckily managed to have a lot of time for programming over the weekend, and it was spent banging my head against the code-wall of how I wanted things to work. It was frustrating as every time I got 90% there, something else would break, and I went back and forth with this charade of almost-finishing a good number of times. But, with the whinging out of the way, I did in fact get there. Well, materially, there's a few things I want to clean up, but all the important things work.

When an NPC offers a quest, it drops an offer into the chat, you can click on it, see the gist and the rewards, and choose to accept or decline. Based on that, your next answer is ready in the conversation where you left off, and the conversation picks up from there. Secondly, I'd never written code to actually complete, nor hand in quests, so that's done too. That needed some extra thought placed around it, but each quest will be handed in to a particular NPC and that's what finishes it up, takes you to a reward screen if there's items, otherwise gives you the money and experience or whatever else and you're on your way.

Oh yeah, as silly as it sounds, I also wrote up some answers the ability to close the conversation entirely and drop you back to the main game. Again, just those tiny things that should be there as core functionality.

What's left? There's a few cosmetic things - the rewards displayed in a quest are pretty bare-bones and need to be improved graphically. I need to do some cleanup when a quest is completed to wipe out any old quest-events from the players history, but have just the right place in the code to do it already, it'll just be some cleanup. Oh, and with conversations, I want one more feature where a reply can circle back to an earlier part of the conversation. Currently, they are purely linear, and with what I was doing over the weekend, I thought it would be easy enough to add a field or two into the database, and then let those conversation threads circle back to earlier parts. Basically to let you get back to something you missed without needing to restart the conversation always.

So, all up, it was very laborious, but also really productive in the end, and certainly bringing me closer to what I think is ready for some alpha testing.